They led the boy into the bus station and with a rattle of coins they boarded a coach that would take them out the north side of Glasgow and towards the green hills of Dumbarton.
By the time they fought their way to the plastic bench at the back of the bus the men were sweating and hard for breath. Mungo sat between them and made himself as small as possible. When one of them looked out the window he studied the side of their face. If they turned his way, he would feign interest out the opposite window and try to avoid their eyes.
Mungo braced his chin on to his chest and tried to stop the nervous itching that was spreading across his face as he watched the grey city go by. He knew he was doing that thing again, the crinkled nose, the blinking, the face that looked like he might sneeze, but never would. He could feel the older man’s gaze upon him.
“Ah cannae ’member the last time ah came oot of the city.” The man’s voice had a raspy quality, like he had a throatful of dry toast. He would occasionally inhale in the middle of a sentence, wavering, like each word might be the last one he managed. Mungo tried to smile up at him, but there was something ferrety about the man that made it hard to look him in the eyes.
The suited stranger turned back to his window and Mungo took this opportunity to study the length of him. He was an angular man in his late fifties or early sixties, but the years had clearly been hard. Mungo had seen his kind before. The young Protestant hooligans off the scheme often hounded men like him for fun, rounding up the jangling drunks outside the working men’s club, taunting them towards the chip shop and then swooping as the last of their coins fell from their burst pockets. Neglectful eating and hard drinking had withered and jaundiced him. There was too much skin over too little fat, his yellow face wrinkling like an overripe apple.
The man’s tatty jacket was mismatched with a pair of dress trousers, the knees of which sagged like more stretched-out skin. Underneath his jacket he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with an advertisement for a plumber on the South Side, the neck was torn and separating from the body. Mungo wondered if perhaps these were the only clothes he owned; they smelled musty, as though he wore them through smirr and shine.
Mungo felt strangely sorry for him. The man was trembling slightly. Years spent hiding from daylight in dark pubs had given him the nervous reactions of a whippet pushed out into the snow, and he had the small darting eyes and long twitching limbs of a mistreated dog. He seemed on the verge of bolting.
As the last of the high-rises faded from view, the suited man made some small sounds, filling the empty air, inviting the others to join him in conversation. Mungo braced his chin to his chest and said nothing. The younger man was scratching his crotch. Mungo watched him from the corner of his eye.
This man seemed to be in his early twenties. He wore indigo denims and his belt was laced under the logo so as not to obscure the proud Armani badge. He was handsome – or he must have been close to it once – but there was something already spoiled about him, like good butcher’s meat that had been left out. Despite the heat he had been wearing a puffy bomber jacket. When he removed it, Mungo could see his arms were roped with lean muscle that spoke to a heavy trade, or years of fighting, or both.
His hair was clipped short. His fringe had been combed forward in a gelled line, the hairs formed little saw-toothed points, as though they had been cut by pinking shears. Mungo stared at the damaged skin of his knuckles. He was honey-coloured in the way Scottish people seldom were; perhaps his family were chip-shop Italian or Spanish by way of the Black Irish.
Any trace of that romance was lost as he said in flat, glottal Glaswegian, “Haw. Dinnae be botherin’ wi’ auld St Christopher.” He spoke without looking directly at either of them. “He’d bore the arse aff a horse.”
Mungo was left to ponder why he was on a bus with St Christopher, while the other man went back to picking his nose. As the man’s pinkie searched the inside of his nostril Mungo noted how he wore sovvie rings on all of his fingers and that his forearms were snaked with interlocking tattoos. He was a man covered in words: from the logos on his chest, to his shoes, to his jeans, to his skin. He had written on his flesh with a sewing needle, women’s names, gang names: Sandra, Jackie, RFC, The Mad Squad. Here and there, the blue biro ink had bled, it wept beneath his skin like a watercolour and tinted him a pretty violet hue. Mungo read his arms carefully. He committed as much as he could to memory.
St Christopher reached into one of the shopping bags, and with a sly wink he raised a half-dozen cans of Tennent’s Super. Keeping his small eyes on the back of the bus driver’s head, he broke two cans free of their noose and offered them to the boy and the tattooed man. Mungo shook his head but the young man took a can with a grateful groan. He burst it open and clamped his lips over the escaping foam. He drained it in three throatfuls.
St Christopher must have read the boy’s mind because he said, “They calls us St Christopher on account ah go to the alcoholic meetings on Hope Street every Sunday and Thursday. Ah’m Sunday-Thursday Christopher, so as no to be confused wi’ Castlemilk Chris or Wee Ginger-Heided Chrissy.” The man took a slug, and Mungo watched his throat struggle to take enough in. “S-T Christopher, ye see?”
Mungo had heard something like that before. Mo-Maw herself was known as Monday-Thursday Maureen. That’s who the other alcoholics asked for when the boy answered the hallway telephone. The callers wanted to be sure they hadn’t found the house of “Maureen from Millerston” or “Wee-Mo frae the Milk” by mistake. These small distinctions mattered if they were to honour the code of anonymity.